Impeccable research informs a prose that sings, whirls, and delights. (10 photos, not seen)
Lively, literate biography of the incredible Sarah Breedlove, who rose from perfect poverty to create her own hair-care business and build a mansion on the Hudson.
“There has never been anyone like her,” declares novelist Lowry (The Track of Real Desires, 1994, etc.; Creative Nonfiction/George Mason Univ.) of the African-American entrepreneur praised by the National Association of Colored Women as “the foremost business woman of our race.” Charging into her story with boundless energy and a bountiful imagination, the author employs all her considerable artistic and scholarly skills to uncover the rough edges of a life smoothed over in her subject’s promotional materials. A consummate businesswoman who took the surname of her third husband and declared herself “Madam,” Walker frequently lied to journalists, and many details of her life cannot be verified. Not for lack of effort on the part of Lowry, who chased Walker all over the country—from her birth in 1867 and her childhood on the Mississippi to her years in St. Louis, Denver, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and New York City—digging in public records, reading old newspapers, trying to establish a sturdy foundation on which to erect the edifice of her story. When Lowry cannot uncover fact, her fecund imagination suffices: “[We] engage in storytelling and educated guesswork,” she states, and one magnificent example is her stunning set piece about doing wash in pre-Maytag days (Walker spent years as a washerwoman). The author chronicles the long and uneasy relationship between Walker and Booker T. Washington, who was never comfortable around this determined, ambitious woman. Throughout, Lowry weaves in depressing data about lynchings and racial murders. She includes characters as diverse as the two Johnsons (Jack and James Weldon), but the focus always remains sharply on Walker, on the development and marketing of her hair-care products, and on her wastrel daughter A’Lelia, who frittered away her mother’s fortune. (A’Lelia gets more sympathetic treatment in Ben Neihart’s Rough Amusements, p. 213.)
Impeccable research informs a prose that sings, whirls, and delights. (10 photos, not seen)Pub Date: April 30, 2003
ISBN: 0-679-44642-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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